Tutorial for starting app developers: Developing a simple files plugin

đŸ’» Development
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Hello hello!

We have been working on a tutorial on how to develop a simple files plugin. This tutorial is perfect for everyone who have not developed Nextcloud apps before but who do have a working development environment. (If you don’t have a working development environment yet, then we have a tutorial for that too! See here.)

The tutorial will guide you through the steps to add an extra action if you click on the three-dots icon next to a directory or file:

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Figure 1: “My directory action” added.

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Figure 2: “My file action” and “My pdf action” added.

You can find the tutorial here in the folder ‘Developing a simple files plugin’:

How difficult is it?
This is not difficult.

Will there be tutorials for developing other types of apps?
Yes, stay tuned :slight_smile:

Will there be video tutorials?
Yes! As a first step, we are looking for people who want to make screen recordings of the steps.

How to contribute?
See the readme. Basically you can just download the source file, make your proposed changes, upload the file, and write me a mail.

We really hope this will be helpful for some of you :pray:

6 Likes
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Hi Daphne,
thank you for the tutorials.
But I’m more looking for a tut, how to connect extern apps like suiteCRM (there is one, but it runs not on the newer Nextcloud 25.0.2/suiteCRM 8.2.2 -versions, also I read on the 7er version it has very few functionality yet).
So a general docs how the connection/authorisation with extern apps works, maybe on the suiteCRM-example would be an idea?

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hey @hermetic ! that sounds like a good idea indeed. I’ll discuss it to see if we can add it to the roadmap for the tutorials :slight_smile: thank you:)

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Hey @Daphne,
thank you for the fast reply. I also offer help.
My Boss wants me to have a lot of extern apps connected, so it’s great when I can have some tips/docs.

Meanwhile I play a bit with nextcloud and app-skelettons. :wink: :+1:

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Hi, how does one update their app?

I followed the tutorial and it worked without problem. Now though I’m trying to modify the result and despite modifying version number, e.g 0.0.1 to 0.0.2 in appinfo/info.xml and package.json I can’t load the new version in Nextcloud. It would though be the usual development process, namely get some basic scaffolding working, test locally, update, etc until satisfied. Consequently documenting how to update a working app would help a lot.

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Thanks for the tutorials, @Daphne! I wish they’d also cover how to run tests. I followed the tutorials but I’ve been struggeling for some time to get phpunit to run in the development environment.

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hey, can you give some more details of what you mean you can’t load the app in Nextcloud? Maybe you can outline some exact steps to reproduce with some screenshots?

With the apps in these tutorials you should see the changes appear directly if you are developing in your local Nextcloud environment. No formal update process of upping the version number is necessary for these simple apps. A hard refresh / refresh with cleared browser cache of your browser should suffice to see the changes you made.

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this is on the roadmap!

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Thanks Daphne, I’m not sure why I assumed this was necessary but indeed I restarted from a clean slate, i.e new plugin generated from skeleton, installed it, modified it straight from its location in the container, refreshed the page and voila, the updated code run. That’s great I now have an environment to iterate fast!

PS: taking the occasion to suggest syntax highlighting on the code files in the tutorial. Even on a short 10 lines example I find it makes understanding a lot easier.

1 Like
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glad to hear it worked for you!